


Switch

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Gen, alternate universe and canon universe, less fluff than usual for my fics but still pretty sweet, minimal romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 07:54:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Breach has two effects: in addition to producing kaiju, it also periodically causes the universe to change or "switch" to an alternate timeline—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. Sometimes lives are wiped out, sometimes the previously dead are back among the living. Sometimes you look back at your old photos to find that you went to state university instead of the community college. Sometimes you look at your hand to find that you are no longer married, or perhaps you never were married at all.</p><p>One day a switch comes while Raleigh is working on the Wall in Sitka, and after the switch he finds himself in Japan. And his arm doesn't hurt any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Everyone’s used to it by now. In a sense. As much as you can get used to monsters rampaging out from the ocean, or the condition of the universe switching in a heartbeat.

 

The PPDC sends out predictions a few hours before, maybe a day before. Cars pull off the road. Kids are kept home from school sometimes, families hold one another’s hands. Compared to this, the kaiju seem ordinary, comprehensible.

 

Radios and TV and the Internet count down to the predicted switch.

 

And then the universe changes—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. Sometimes lives are wiped out, sometimes the previously dead are back among the living. Sometimes you look back at your old photos to find that you went to the state university instead of the community college. Sometimes you look at your hand to find that you are no longer married, or perhaps you never were married at all.

 

After a while, everyone’s memory gets a little jumbled. There’s no point trying to keep track of it all, and that’s impossible, anyway, because any notes you take about the switches might not exist in the next universe. But most people remember how it was at the beginning, before the switches began. Before the Breach. They call that the First Universe, now, and some people see it as the only real one.

 

Just like the kaiju, the switches are coming more frequently now. The PPDC is investigating the Breach, trying to explain what causes the switches; they think that closing the Breach will end the switches, but that’s hard to do because each switch can bring a change in the Jaegers or the pilots.

 

The switches keep coming. People try to adjust.

 

*** 

 

In 2025, Raleigh Becket is in Sitka, Alaska, building the Wall of Life, when a switch comes. It’s been predicted, so the second shift construction workers are on the ground, waiting. (You make sure you’re not doing something dangerous when a switch comes, because you don’t know what you’ll be doing after the switch, and it takes a minute to mentally adjust.)

 

The switch comes, and it’s almost painful but kind of instant, so the pain hardly has time to hit. It feels like being swallowed up, Raleigh thinks.

 

And then he opens his eyes again, and he’s not outside in the snow. He’s not even outside in Alaska.

 

He’s sitting at a teacher’s desk in a school. The papers on his desk are partly written in Japanese; it looks like they’re English lessons for Japanese speakers. He might actually be in Japan.

 

His left shoulder doesn’t hurt, either.

 

Raleigh takes a few minutes to stare at the classroom (empty, it looks like late afternoon, going by the windows), the papers (some graded, some not) and his left arm (which feels fine like it hasn’t in five years). Then he reaches into his pocket, finds a cell phone (he still has a cell phone!), and awkwardly flips through the contacts.

 

Names he doesn’t know, many of them Japanese.

Jazmine.

More strangers.

The bottom of the alphabet, and there it is.

Yancy.

 

There has never been a universe before where Yancy is still alive.

 

Raleigh’s finger hovers over the call button, but he can’t do it just then. What do you say to one of the dead who’s come back? (There are TV shows and movies about this question.) Even worse, what if Yancy is still gone in this universe and Raleigh just didn’t delete his name from his phone?

 

Instead, Raleigh looks through his recent calls and text messages.

 

They’re all from someone named Mako.

 

Raleigh is better at speaking Japanese than reading it, but they’re just little odd notes and he can figure most of them out. “Late tonight—finishing a project at work.” “Good idea—it will be sunny tomorrow.” “Make your hamburgers tonight?” “I’m wearing your sweater.” “Let’s get a dog.”

 

Some of the messages seem like half a conversation, but he can’t find any messages from him that she’s responding to. His own texts to her are similar: “The blue one,” is what he wrote to her most recently. The blue what?

 

After another minute of staring at the messages, Raleigh thinks, screw it, and he calls Yancy’s number. His palm is sweating; it’s been years since he even touched a cell phone.

 

What the hell is this universe?

 

Ring. Ring.

 

“Raleigh? What’s up—you okay, kid?” Yancy's voice. It's Yancy.

 

Raleigh can hardly choke the words out. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just checking on you after the switch.”

 

“You had to call me long distance,” says Yancy in that familiar way where he makes a question into a statement. “I told you, use Skype or something, don’t run up your phone bill! I’m fine, no big changes here. Dumbass. How’s Mako?”

 

Raleigh is rubbing his sleeve over his eyes. “I dunno. I didn’t call her.”

 

Raleigh knows, just knows, that Yancy is rolling his eyes. “Well, go call _her_. Email me later.”

 

And Yancy hangs up.

 

Raleigh has to bend over the desk, covering his face with his hands, until he gets his breath back. Okay. This is a universe where Yancy is alive, and fine. Where Yancy doesn’t even know he was once dead. Where Raleigh’s arm is fine, where Raleigh’s not wearing dog tags.

 

They were never Jaeger pilots in this universe.

 

The sunlight is a little golden through the windows. Raleigh’s drawn to go over and look through them, and when he does he sees a city, Japanese shop signs and ads.

 

Raleigh pulls out his phone again; he must have photos of Mako, whoever she is. He always has photos.

 

And there she is, once he finds them. Photos of Yancy from a while back, and photos of Raleigh with his arms around friends he doesn’t know, but there are a lot of photos of a woman with a short, blunt bob haircut who must be Mako. Smiling at the camera, laughing, giving the camera a faux-dirty look when Raleigh’s interrupting her doing something. And there are photos of her with Raleigh that Raleigh must have taken by holding the phone at arm’s length: photos of them squeezed together in front of a starry sky, a park with trees, some kind of museum.

 

So this is Mako. Not a stranger any more. She has a face, a personality. She’s real. And this is a life Raleigh really, really wants, now that he’s seen it. He’s been alone on the wall for so long, and now up pops a universe where Yancy’s alive and Raleigh has . . . well, he has Mako. A friend, or a girlfriend, Raleigh doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but . . . she’s on his side, and he’s on her side.

 

A universe where Raleigh was never a Jaeger pilot, though.

 

Raleigh goes back to the desk and flips through stuff (it’s a mess, he’s kind of embarrassed) until he finds a pay stub shoved in a drawer that bears what he hopes is his address.

 

He lives in Tokyo. This is Tokyo. But from what he’s seen, it doesn’t look like it was ever destroyed. Maybe there was something else different in this universe, something that saved Tokyo and stopped Raleigh and Yancy from becoming Rangers.

 

Raleigh gets directions to the address on his phone and heads for the subway.

 

***

 

It’s only when Raleigh is almost home (well, to the place he hopes is his home) that he realizes maybe he was supposed to take some of those papers home for grading or something. Oops. Too late.

 

It’s his stop, he gets off, and then he’s heading to the apartment building and going up the elevator and yes, his keys fit in the lock. This is where he lives.

 

He goes in.

 

Nobody else is there; the apartment is still and quiet, feels like it’s been empty all day. But it’s also obvious to Raleigh that he doesn’t live alone.

 

Raleigh takes his shoes off and walks into the apartment tentatively, holding himself back from touching anything. He hasn’t ever really had an adult home; first he lived in Shatterdomes, and then he lived in crappy bunkhouses for guys doing construction on the wall. But this is a real home: a real kitchen with dishtowels and everything, a fridge with some real food in it. There’s stuff on the walls that Raleigh thinks is his (photos he probably took), but there’s some stuff that’s definitely not his either—like swords, real Japanese swords, not fake costume stuff. There’s a basket with a heap of folded laundry on the floor there, and on top there’s a soft woman’s cardigan. Underneath it is a big men’s sweater that has to be Raleigh’s.

 

Raleigh looks into the bedroom from the doorway: just one big bed.

 

The sound of another key in the door—Raleigh jolts, but then just turns back toward the entrance hall. He hopes he’s right in thinking he lives here too.

 

The door opens, and . . . that’s Mako coming in. She bends over to take her shoes off and then looks up at him. She looks like her pictures, except she’s not smiling. She looks tired. No, that’s not right—her eyes are dry, but she looks like she’s holding herself back from crying.

 

The switch. Raleigh got Yancy back—did Mako lose someone?

 

“Hi,” Raleigh says. His Japanese is a little rusty, but he’s trying. “I’m Raleigh Becket. I hope I’m in the right place.”

 

“Mako Mori,” Mako says. “Yes, I think we both live here. I have a lot of photos of you here.”

 

Raleigh takes a deep breath. “Look, are you okay?”

 

“I’m okay,” Mako says, switching to English. She comes in and puts her hands on a dresser, like she’s leaning on it. “I lost my family in Onibaba’s attack on Tokyo. They’re all alive again now. I have a brother.” 

 

Judging by her age now, she must have been just a child when Onibaba attacked. “Oh, my god,” Raleigh says. “That’s—my brother’s alive again too. I just called him on the phone.” 

 

Mako nods in understanding and turns toward him. “Raleigh,” she says. “You’ve seen the city. Have you looked for information about the kaiju? Or the Breach?”

 

“No,” Raleigh says. “I mean, it seems like the kaiju never hit Tokyo.”

 

Mako shakes her head. “I looked it up. There are no kaiju. There is no Breach in this universe.”

 

Raleigh can’t say anything for a moment. “Then that means this was the last switch,” he says. Yancy will be alive forever now. And Mako’s family too. Everyone . . . he and Yancy were never Jaeger pilots because _there have never been Jaegers_.

 

“Maybe,” Mako says. “We can’t know for sure—not yet.”

 

“They were estimating the next switch in about a week,” Raleigh says, following her train of thought. “So . . .”

 

Raleigh and Mako look at one another. One week with lost families, in a world safe from the kaiju. In a world with no Jaegers. And then—either the apocalypse begins again, or they’re stuck in this strange universe. Where Raleigh never felt what it was like to stride through the Pacific Ocean in a Jaeger, where he never knew Tendo or any of the other pilots, where he’s living a stranger’s life.

 

With Mako.

 

“If we’re going to live together for a week at least, we should know something about each other,” says Mako.

 

“You want to get dinner?” says Raleigh. “There’s a lot of food I’d like to try now there’s no rationing. Also, I can’t cook.”

 

“Neither can I,” Mako says. “Let’s go out.” And there’s the smallest hint of that happiness that the Mako in the photographs showed to the Raleigh behind the camera. Raleigh wonders if he’s smiling as goofily as the Raleigh in the photos did.

 

Already, he doesn’t want to let this go.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Mako and Raleigh both order a ridiculous amount of food for dinner—and they’re not the only ones doing it, either. The whole city is celebrating, setting off fireworks, even going out into the streets. The word has got out that the kaiju are gone. Tokyo is back, a lot of people lost to the kaiju have returned, and the world is happy. For now.

 

Mako is an automotive engineer in this universe, she tells him over curry and beer.

 

“What did you do before?” Raleigh asks.

 

She picks at the label on her beer bottle a little. “I was a Ranger with the PPDC. I helped design and re-fit Jaegers.”

 

Raleigh leans forward. “So you’re a pilot?”

 

“No, but I wanted to be.”

 

“What were your simulator scores?”

 

“Fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills,” Mako says, with a little surprise at the question. “Were you a Ranger too?”

 

 "Those are some pretty impressive scores," Raleigh says. Out in the street, people are calling out to each other, shouting and singing. “Yeah, I was a pilot, five years ago. I piloted a Mark 3 with my brother, Yancy. That was how he died.”

 

“Oh,” Mako says. Her hand drops from the beer bottle; there’s a strange expression on her face that Raleigh can’t quite place. “Raleigh and Yancy Becket. Your Jaeger was Gipsy Danger.”

 

“That’s right,” Raleigh says. “Mako, are you okay?”

 

“Yes,” she says, and the strange expression is mostly gone. “I knew I recognized the name, but I didn’t connect you to the Jaeger pilot until now. That’s all.”

 

The moment passes, and he tells her that apparently he’s an English teacher now. He has no idea how to be a teacher, but he guesses he’ll just do his best—and she laughs when he says this, so it seems like everything’s okay.

 

They spend the rest of the evening talking while the city parties outside the restaurant windows and other tables get rowdier. Even the restaurant owner must be in a festive mood, because the waiters come around with extra desserts just for celebration’s sake. Raleigh learns that Mako was adopted by Marshall Pentecost, of all people; she’s determined to make contact with him when they get home.

 

At one point, they take out their cell phones and try to figure out what some of their odd past conversations were about. They still can’t figure out what was or wasn’t blue, but they come to the conclusion that they both have always wanted to own a dog. Mako wants a bulldog, Raleigh wants a Golden Retriever that he can teach tricks to.

 

By the time they get home, it’s very late; luckily, they discover, the city has declared the next day a holiday, so there will be no work for either of them. The collection of beer they drank over the evening is just enough to leave them feeling nice, but not enough to make them regret the indulgence in the morning. Floating on that cloud of mild inebriation, Raleigh offers to sleep on the couch, and Mako tells him that the bed is big enough and he should just get in.

 

They both fall asleep comfortably on their separate sides of the bed. It’s such a pleasant change from his bunk back in Sitka that Raleigh sleeps like a rock well into the morning, although Mako’s PPDC training wakes her up early.

 

***

 

Mako discovers that in this universe Stacker (no longer Marshall) Pentecost is a member of Parliament for the London borough of Hackney, while his sister (Raleigh didn’t know that Pentecost had a sister) has a high rank in the Royal Air Force. Raleigh has never yet seen Mako so happy as she is in the hour she spends cross-legged on the couch, talking to Pentecost in a mixture of Japanese and English. She calls him _Sensei_. Then Mako goes to spend the rest of the day with her Japanese family.

 

Likewise, Raleigh makes a Skype date for the evening with Yancy (after taking several hours to figure out the computer and his passwords for everything), but he still isn’t really prepared for it when Yancy’s face appears on his screen. It’s early in the morning for Yancy, who is a light aircraft pilot in Alaska; in the sunrise light, Yancy looks old. Not old-man old, but he’s five years older than the Yancy Raleigh knew, and it shows. Yancy keeps asking Raleigh what’s wrong, why he’s acting strange, and at one point Raleigh has to pretend Mako is at the door so he can step away from the computer for a second.

 

Yancy is also married (married!). He keeps asking when Mako and Raleigh are going to come visit.

 

Raleigh isn’t sure how he feels when the conversation is over. By the look of Mako when she comes home, she feels the same way, so they both go out for a walk in the city, Raleigh with his real camera (of the kind he hasn’t touched since before Anchorage) around his neck.

 

They don’t talk much as they walk, but they don’t really need to. Raleigh mostly listens to Mako explain details about the car she’s designing, while he occasionally stops to take photographs of something striking, like all the festival banners that have appeared since yesterday to cheer the disappearance of the kaiju.

 

They don’t talk about the PPDC or the kaiju or the Jaegers, or the fact that the last time Mako was in Tokyo in the first universe she was watching it be destroyed.

 

They come home when the sun is starting to set, hang their coats up in the hall, and then they almost kiss, as though it’s an old habit, before they realize it’s not. So, instead, Raleigh gets into bed and reads a well-thumbed mystery novel he’s never seen before while Mako takes a bath and then gets into bed next to him, smelling clean and slightly damp. It's comforting to feel her weight on the mattress next to him, even though there's a space between them when they sleep.

 

It almost feels like he’s play-acting someone else’s life, but it’s a nice life, Raleigh thinks.

 

***

 

More days pass. Raleigh teaches English, somehow. They still don't have a clue how to cook (neither of them really ever had access to a kitchen), but they’re also still eager to eat their fill for once of real food, so they spend money on eating out, or snack luxuriously. Raleigh gets used to Mako fast, and he realizes that he is not the kind of person who was ever meant to be solitary. In the old days, Yancy was his other half, his partner. Now that’s Mako, one way or another. The apartment doesn’t feel right when she’s not there; her presence, her opinions, her influence are what makes it feel like home. They still don’t kiss, and Raleigh doesn’t expect anything more from Mako, but he also thinks he senses that she's holding herself back. And he doesn't quite understand why.

 

But then he catches the look on her face in the mirror one morning when she's drying her hair in the bathroom, when she thinks he doesn't see. He calls out to her from the doorway, but then he sees her expression change in the mirror's reflection as she calls back her reply: it's the same look she wore when they went out to dinner that first night and he told her his name. Now, with a second glance, he can pin it down better. It's also the same expression she wore when she told him about her family. A hollow, secret grief.

 

While Mako finishes drying her hair, Raleigh goes to sit down on the couch for a minute; there's a tingling going up his spine, and he feels a little sick. She wasn't just reacting to his name. She was reacting to  _who he was_.

 

Yancy doesn't know he was dead. Mako's family don't know they were dead. That's the rule: the dead don't know. They think they're coming from a universe where they were alive.

 

Which is more likely: that Raleigh piloted his Jaeger to shore by himself, or that he died together with Yancy?

 

Mako is waiting to see if the next switch takes Raleigh away again. 

 

Raleigh doesn't sleep at all that night. He doesn't blame Mako at all for not telling him; he didn't tell Yancy either. How do you say something like that? But he lies awake thinking: if these are his last few days on Earth, what should he do? If another switch comes, what will it feel like? 

 

In the end, he decides to stay where he is. With Mako.

 

***

 

On the one-week anniversary of the last switch, neither of them can sleep. They stay up talking Jaeger tech for the first time; they take turns outlining their ideal Jaeger design. Mako wants to use a sword in her Jaeger; Raleigh stays mostly loyal to Gipsy.

 

There’s no new switch, and more celebrating the next day.

 

Two more weeks pass, and on a Saturday they decide to go to the beach, partly as an act of defiance. In this universe, the beach isn’t a frightening, kaiju-Blue-polluted place; it’s an ordinarily-polluted, family-and-kids type of place.

 

It’s a warm day in autumn, so Mako wears a sweet dress, and Raleigh feels silly in long shorts, and they go hang out among the throngs and throngs of people who had the exact same idea and look out to sea. Even though they’re really just looking out across Tokyo Bay, these are still the waters of the Pacific. They seem so friendly now—not irradiated, not hiding a terrible secret.

 

And then the sirens go off and police are running across the beach telling them to evacuate.

 

Because a kaiju is coming.

 

Raleigh and Mako grab onto each other hard and run, together with the crowd, back toward the hotels and beach shacks and buildings. But they know they can’t run fast enough—there’s no subway close enough, there’s no refuge, and the crowds have jammed the area anyway in their panic so that nobody can move.

 

They’re pressed against the sandy wall of a building, holding on to one another. Raleigh knows Mako’s seeing Onibaba in her memories, and for all they know this could be Onibaba again, just coming later than before.

 

“Mako, listen,” Raleigh says, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “I’m here. We’re gonna be okay.”

 

“Raleigh,” Mako says, pressed against him by the crowd. Although her cheeks are wet, her voice is steady. “There could be another switch. If there’s another switch, we’ll find each other.”

 

“Yeah, we will,” Raleigh says.

 

"We _will_ ," Mako says, holding her hand against his cheek, and Raleigh knows he was right. He was one of the dead. 

 

In holding on to one another, they try to shut everything else out—the sounds of the crowd, the helicopters, the ocean. Raleigh realizes he never let Yancy talk to Mako—the one person he wanted Yancy to meet.

 

They hold on to one another tight, and close their eyes.

 

***

 

The switch is a sensation like being swallowed—like being compressed and then suddenly breathing again.

 

Raleigh is in Sitka again. He’s standing in the snow with a bunch of other guys in Sitka, and there are tears in his eyes that are freezing in the cold wind. The supervisor yells at them to get back to work, and just like that, the past universe has ended. Like it was never there.

 

Raleigh just hopes that somewhere in the world—maybe in Tokyo, or a Shatterdome somewhere—Mako is adjusting to this new universe, too. He'd do anything he could to get back to her, but in this universe he has no money at all—only a few changes of clothes to his name, and barely enough to eat even with top-of-the-wall rations. So he can’t leave: he can’t pay for the transport, he’ll starve.  

 

As days go by, Raleigh tries as hard as he can to find Mako, but even the outpost’s supply of electricity is sketchy, and the only few computers there are ancient and used for calculating payroll—no internet access. He'd give anything for a few minutes with the smartphone he had back in Tokyo. Here, the phone lines are shoddy, and the payphone in the bunkhouse won’t allow Raleigh to call internationally anyway, and he can't reach anyone in the Alaska Shatterdome because it's been shut down. Although he doesn’t stop trying, using up every spare cent he makes, he’s not making progress.

 

He thinks of her all the time, though. Is she in Japan, or is she with the PPDC? The PPDC is cutting off funds to the Jaeger Program, the TV reports say. He can only hope that somehow she finds him.

 

He showers in the dribbling communal showers, he sleeps on the hard bunk with fifteen other guys around him, but more than the luxuries of the Tokyo apartment he misses talking to Mako. Listening to Mako. The dialogue with her, the back and forth of text messages and photos, the little signs in the apartment that said she'd been sitting in this chair or making more coffee. Her voice.

 

Another switch hits, but this time nothing material happens except that a section of wall they just built becomes un-built. The supervisors curse and then the workers get back to work.

 

Then, just as Raleigh is getting off shift, a sign more beautiful than an angel appears: a PPDC helicopter.

 

Raleigh walks forward; from the helicopter emerges Marshall Pentecost himself, looking unchanged from the passing of the last five years. “Mr. Becket,” Pentecost says.

 

“Marshall,” Raleigh says.

 

“You’re a hard man to find,” Pentecost says. He explains that he has a Mark 3 Jaeger almost completely refurbished at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, that he needs Raleigh to pilot. He has a plan to close the Breach, but they need to act fast, before the next switch comes. “Our old records showed you as deceased," Pentecost adds, "but one of our Rangers noticed that our records after the second-to-last switch now mark you as merely retired. Miss Mori, the same Ranger who rebuilt your Jaeger.”

 

Pentecost totally knows, of course. “Thank you, sir,” Raleigh says.

 

The flight to Hong Kong takes forever, even though Raleigh sleeps restlessly off and on throughout it, but at last he’s in the chopper closing in on the Shatterdome helipad, and a figure is waiting out in the rain with a big umbrella.

 

Raleigh rushes out down the steps and through the rain, and there’s Mako in her PPDC greatcoat, lifting up the umbrella to cover them both. There are blue tips in her hair now. Was that the blue thing? Raleigh will never know; that old universe is dissolved now. But Mako is here, and she's pulling him closer, and that’s all that matters. 

 

Under the cover of the umbrella and the torrential rain, they finally give into the kiss that feels like old habit, that feels like it’s been waiting far too long. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave me a comment with your thoughts! I love comments.


End file.
